2011: What Every Contact Center Should Know, and How to Plan for ItThursday
January 27, 2011
TIME: 11:30am ET

Contact center technology, as well as the dynamics of delivering quality service, is changing at a rapid pace. The accelerated adoption of cloud-based solutions, the incorporation of social media into the multi-channel mix, the need to accurately capture the voice of the customer, new methods of measuring agent effectiveness…what will change in 2011 and how can you be ready? Join us for this live web event where Forrester Research principal analyst, Art Schoeller and Interactive Intelligence senior vice president, Joe Staples will discuss these topics and help you be ready to take the best advantage of the upcoming year and the contribution your contact center can make to the success of your business.

Following the web presentation, there will be an extensive Q&A, where Schoeller and Staples will be joined by industry veterans, Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst of COMMfusion LLC and a co-founder of ucstrategies.com, Sheila McGee-Smith, Founder of McGee-Smith Analytics, LLC, Don Van Doren, Founder & President of Vanguard Communications, as the panel responds to audience questions.

Joe Staples serves as chief marketing officer for Interactive Intelligence. He oversees the global marketing efforts of the company’s award winning contact center and communication product lines. Mr. Staples brings over 25 years of experience in technology and marketing to Interactive Intelligence, including specific assignments in the areas of contact center automation, computer telephony, unified messaging, mobile wireless, computer networking, and computer-based education. Mr. Staples is a frequent industry presenter, author of various communication-related articles, and an active blogger.

Art Schoeller
Principal Analyst,
Forrester Research

As Principal Analyst at Forrester Research Art Schoeller supports Infrastructure and Operations professionals who plan, build, and run Unified Communications and Contact Center workloads for enterprises. Art Schoeller's 35 years of experience spans the computer, communications and software industries. Art was an early member of the call center product management team at AT&T, helping them establish their early market share gains that lead to Avaya being a leader today. He is best known in the contact center industry for his accomplishments with CTI by helping to establish standards and solutions to grow the market in its early stages while at AT&T/Lucent. He lead the team that partnered with Novell to establish the CSTA standard. This standard continues to this day to be the default CTI interface for contact center and telephony integration applications. In addition he has had vice president and director level roles in product management and marketing for conferencing, collaboration, and unified messaging products while at AT&T/Lucent and Dictaphone. In the four years he worked at Microsoft he lead the development of a Unified Communications and Collaboration solution with Accenture that drove $500M in software and services sales, and 1M seats of cloud computing. Art also filled leadership roles in analyzing these markets while holding director level positions at Gartner Group, Yankee Group, and now Forrester Research. In these roles he did industry leading research on the transition to VoIP, multi-channel contact centers and speech recognition technology.

Blair Pleasant
President & Principal Analyst,
COMMfusion LLC

Blair Pleasant is President & Principal Analyst of COMMfusion LLC and a co-founder of ucstrategies.com, an industry resource on the growing UC arena. She provides consulting and market research analysis on voice/data convergence markets, applications, and technologies, aimed at helping end-user and vendor clients both strategically and tactically. Prior to COMMfusion, Ms. Pleasant was Director of Communications Analysis for The PELORUS Group, a market research and consulting firm, and President of Lower Falls Consulting. With 20 years experience, her primary areas of focus are convergence applications, including Unified Communications, the contact center, computer telephony integration (CTI), Unified Messaging and voice processing. Blair has authored many highly acclaimed multi-client market studies and white papers, as well as custom research reports, and provides market research analysis and consulting services to end user and vendor clients. Find her blogs and articles on www.ucstrategies.com and www.commfusion.com. Blair also tweets on Twitter as blairplez, and you can find her on Facebook and LinkedIn. She can be contacted at bpleasant@commfusion.com.

Don Van Doren
President,
Vanguard Communications Corp

Don Van Doren is President of Vanguard Communications Corp, an independent consulting company that helps clients plan, design, and implement effective customer interaction solutions. Most of Vanguard’s work is with enterprises that seek to improve their contact center and self-service technologies and processes, and to integrate the customer experience as a fundamental component of meeting business goals. Over the past decade, Don’s research, client work, and writing has been increasingly focused on the emerging field of unified communications (UC). He co-founded UniComm Consulting, an independent consulting firm that helps enterprises understand the potential for UC in their business, develop strategies, identify applications, and assist with implementation. Don works on client assignments in strategy, design, and the use of new processes and technology to achieve business objectives. He is a frequent author and speaker. Don has an undergraduate degree from Yale University and an MBA from the University of Michigan.

Sheila McGee-Smith
Founder,
McGee-Smith Analytics, LLC

Sheila McGee-Smith, the founder of McGee-Smith Analytics, LLC, is a leading communications industry analyst and strategic consultant. With a practice focused on the contact center and enterprise communications markets, Ms. McGee-Smith works on a daily basis with both solution providers and enterprises to help them develop strategies to meet the escalating demands of today's consumer and business customers. Ms. McGee-Smith has spent 20 years in the communications industry, including 12 years with the New Jersey-based analyst firm The PELORUS Group. Prior to joining The PELORUS Group, Ms. McGee-Smith held sales management, market research and product management positions at AT&T, Timeplex and Dun & Bradstreet. She received a bachelor's degree from Barnard College, Columbia University and an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.

Moderator:

Tim Passios
Director of Solutions Marketing,
Interactive Intelligence

As director of Solutions Marketing, Tim's team is responsible for creating positioning and messaging for all products in the Interactive Intelligence portfolio. Solutions Marketing is also the outward facing delivery team for webinar, seminar, analyst and media presentations as well as prospect and end customer demonstrations. Tim has been with Interactive Intelligence since 1998, and has more than 17 years experience overall in the contact center and business communications industry.